Gen Z is choosing not to drive

Yea. I think there’s genuine generational shift here. Which in many ways makes sense. I never heard a negative word from my elders/parents about cars, while I and many of my friends and partners have had one and arrived at fairly critical to down right negative views about cars and driving.

Why it would be generational strikes me again as fairly obvious.

Traffic congestion has only gotten worse over time. The freedom machine ideal of the car has therefore very much faded. And things like traffic jams and the general stress of driving and parking etc are the sorts of thing that are hard to unsee once you’ve seen them. The damage they do in destroying or preventing pedestrian friendly areas is similar. The whole climate thing shifts the value proposal again.

And then there’s the pure generational factor too. Cars are relatively new. It makes sense that they’ve been on some hype curve this whole time, peaking with the boomers. Now it feels obvious we’ve overdone it and relied on them too much. Watching plenty of cars scramble to find a car park or get stuck in traffic, each bearing a single driver/passenger while taking up 5-10 square meters … again hard to unsee.

Once you’ve seen or even lived a life without all that noise, they’re no longer the must haves they were for the past decades.

Yep. My parents offered to buy my gen Z brother a car, and he asked for an e-bike instead. I (a millenial) also choose to not have a car for both environmental reasons and just... not wanting to drive and deal with traffic and car maintenance and whatnot. Thankfully we live in a city whose public transportation's getting better by day.

My partner and I live in Silicon Valley and it's cheaper for us to rent a car when we need it than to own one. We'd use it maybe twice a month so rentals just make more sense. We're moving to San Francisco soon though and at that point we'll likely never own a car and just transit everywhere.

Toyota Corollas are really popular though. For a Kia of the same age the previous owner will pay you 5k if you take it off their hands.

I think there's also the issue of where do kids have to go hang out anymore?

By and large, malls are dead/dying, and some don't even allow unsupervised kids anymore.

Movies are expensive. Restaurants are expensive. Concerts are expensive (if you're lucky enough to live somewhere with easy access to concert venues, if you're in the suburbs you probably have an uphill battle trying to convince your parents to let you go wandering around the city unsupervised to go to a concert) Arcades basically don't even exist anymore.

They can barely even go hang out in a park without being harassed by some Karen or the cops, and of course parks usually close at dusk and kind of depend on the weather being decent so in many places there's a good chunk of the year where parks are undesirable.

You can hang out at your friends' houses, but depending on your area there's a decent chance that they may be in walking or biking distance so no need for a car, and if you're just going to be hanging around the house, not a big deal for Mom or Dad to drop you off/pick you up, not like you're going to really need a car while you're there, you got nowhere to go anyway. And of course we get some parents these days who are really weird about their kids going over to other people's homes, which leaves staying home and hanging out online.

About the only thing I can think of that I used to do as a kid that might still be accessible for kids and might necessitate them having their own car is to go hang out at the local comic/game shop to play magic, d&d, etc. Because most of them are pretty cool about people just coming to hang out, but even that could really be a "hey parental unit, can I get a ride?" kind of thing.

Plus, if you have a tight group of friends you always hang out with, you may only need a couple drivers. Even going back to when I was a teen/young adult, a lot of my friends didn't have a license and many of them who did didn't have their own car or couldn't count on borrowing their parents' car. I know the core group I hung out with was probably around 6-10 people, and one other guy and I did 99% of our driving whenever we went to do something because we were the ones with cars. Probably up until I was about 23 I spent a lot of time picking friends up and giving them rides places because I had a car and they didn't.

the insane part is this family friend willing to give ur son a car he doesn't want.

Or younger people just have a generally negative view towards cars as a primary mode of transport. I realized that ever since I moved to a city, I haven't needed a car and cars just make cities worse. I can really afford a really nice car, but I have no need for one.